I’m in the thick of editing our Tobias Hume sessions from exactly a year ago. It always takes longer than I think it’s going to, but then everything always takes longer than I think it’s going to: I’m still coming to terms with that basic rule of time management. But the editing process for me is something like this:

1. LISTENING Listen through to every take, making copious notes.
This is much harder work than you might think, as there will probably be hours of material and you need to listen in at least two ways at once. I note down which musical material is in each take, a general impression of the feel of each section, and also on the score I note whenever something is too catastrophic to use, or too brilliant to leave out. As I’ve usually been playing in the sessions myself, it’s good to leave some time before doing this bit (not necessarily a whole year) so that I don’t end up just listening to my own playing and how it didn’t turn out the way I thought it would. Listening for feel and listening for detail simultaneously while writing takes concentration, and as with the rest of this process, regular breaks are essential or you stop being able to hear anything at all. If it’s going very well I can sketch an editing plot as I go along, choosing which takes will be used and where in …

2. THE FIRST EDIT
This is usually a rough assemblage of takes, not worrying too much about the delicacy of each edit or every note being exactly where I would like it. It will give me a rough idea of how each track will turn out, from which I can start to think about a running order, or whether some stuff just isn’t good enough to make the album at all.  I’ll put this on my phone and listen to it while walking around the streets to find out which tracks I get excited about and which I lose interest in. Then I’ll listen to that in detail and make notes on the score of everything that still needs to be fixed. In …

3. THE SECOND EDIT
I’m two-thirds of the way through this at the moment, and this is the gruelling bit: deciding in forensic detail what to fix and what to leave alone. Too much editing and the feel gets destroyed (I used to listen to all second edits once while drunk to check for this, but  exhaustion is a fair substitute); not enough editing and the musical ‘imperfections’ are a distraction for the listener. If it goes right then the hours of fiddly crossfades, sometimes to correct a single note, reward you with a second edit where the music is what you hear rather than the bum notes. Get it wrong and you just hear a load of edits, and glitchcore isn’t really what I’m aiming for with Tobias Hume. Not on this record anyway.

4. FINAL TWEAKS
Inevitably there are bits where the pernickety detail of the second edit has lost something that was there before, so one last set of listening notes (by this time my scribbles on the score are in at least two colours to tell them apart) and a few final edits, and we’re ready either to mix or to master. Usually with classical-style recording I’ve been working on stereo mixes all this time and mastering comes next (even with Revenge of the Folksingers, Steve Portnoi did the mixes first and then I did the editing) but with Hume I’ve been editing the multitrack directly, so that Calum Malcolm can mix post-edit, next week. All the more reason to be sure that I’ve got the editing decisions right …